macOS 15.1 Firewall Breaks Third-Party Firewalls
Apple’s built-in firewall is causing troubles when used together with third-party firewalls that are based on Apple’s Network Extension framework (which is actually the only way for third-party developers to create such firewall products for the Mac).
While one of the issues related to DNS lookups has been fixed in macOS 15.1, a new, even more serious one was introduced.
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For the time being, until Apple fixes this serious bug in macOS, we therefore highly recommend to turn off the built-in firewall of macOS when also using Little Snitch or Little Snitch Mini.
Previously:
- macOS 15.1
- Networking Issues in Sequoia
- macOS Firewall Regressions in Sequoia
- Little Snitch 6 and DNS Encryption
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The networking bugs in Sequoia have been painful. Not sure if it's related but I've had a recurring issue where Safari refuses to load web pages entirely, other Webkit-using apps like Instapaper stop responding, and only a reboot fixes the issue. Not to mention the ongoing coreaudiod / SoundSource crashes. For me, Sequoia is the least reliable macOS release in years.
These clowns can't have one release without a major breakage. It's amazing how horrible everything has become. Imagine being a business that relies on selling security software for this platform, or an IT department that wants to rely on the OS or tools installed on it.
Another issue I'm seeing in Safari seems related to opening the developer tools deleting all cookies and local storage. I've seen thread in the WebKit issue tracker, but they claim it's solved. It's not. Everything is just a broken mess.
I shall continue avoiding Sequoia.
Back when Sonoma was released I avoided it for similar reasons -- so many bug reports and breakages. How's it going now? Now that the baton for buggiest macOS seems to have been passed to Sequoia, has Sonoma reached any kind of reasonable level of stability that's at least comparable to Ventura?
@Léo Natan - The exact issue you have described started happening to me over a year ago. I put up with it for a long time. I had been a Safari user since v1.0.
About 5 weeks ago, after opening dev tools and being logged out of every website for the 26,446th time that day and the 166,694,380th time that month, I wanted to take the laptop, snap it in half, set it on fire, and then throw it into a wood chipper, which is also on fire.
Since that's kind of expensive I decided to switch to Firefox instead. It's been an improvement in both reliability and my blood pressure. (I do miss ⌘-Z to reopen the last closed tab though.)
Alan writes above on webpages in Safari – Just 20 minutes ago I had to restart Safari to make it load a webpage – clearing the cache didn't help. Hard to tell if it is network related or not – did restart Wi-Fi but it did not help here & tested to ping my external DNS. It does happen more frequently now.
